WASHINGTON — Intelligence officials reviewing emails on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private computer server have found information they consider to be of a higher level of classification than “top secret,” according to a letter sent to lawmakers last week by the intelligence agencies’ inspector general.

The letter, dated last Thursday, says that some of the information in Mrs. Clinton’s emails has been determined to be “top secret/SAP.” That designation is usually given to information about “special access programs” — often intelligence-gathering programs and other secret programs run by the Pentagon and the C.I.A. — that are among the government’s most closely guarded secrets.

The letter to Congress, from I. Charles McCullough III, the inspector general for the nation’s intelligence agencies, provides no specifics about the classified material. It is not clear from the letter whether Mrs. Clinton sent or received the emails, nor how many contained the classified information.

Last year, the intelligence agencies found after the fact that two of Mrs. Clinton’s emails contained information that was “top secret.” The State Department disputed the determination, but it prompted an F.B.I. investigation into whether such information had been mishandled in connection with Mrs. Clinton’s account. By law, classified information is not allowed outside government computer servers. The government has said that Mrs. Clinton is not a subject of the investigation.

The letter was sent to the Republican chairmen of the Senate Intelligence and Foreign Relations Committees. It was not made public.

“This is the same interagency dispute that has been playing out for months, and it does not change the fact that these emails were not classified at the time they were sent or received,” Brian Fallon, a spokesman for the Clinton campaign, said.

“It appears that this may still revolve around a State Department employee forwarding a published news article about the drone program,” he said. “If so, it would further reinforce how absurd it is to suggest that Secretary Clinton did anything wrong.”

From the information released, it is unclear whether the information in question was marked as classified at the time it was sent or received, or whether the information was contained in emails that were sent to or received by Clinton herself. The first question is relevant, of course, because it would be quite a serious violation of the law if anyone were to knowingly send or receive information classified at any level via any means other than a secure government server. It’s worth noting, however, that the relevant law also specifies that government employees have an independent duty to take care that classified information is not sent outside approved networks and means of transmission regardless of whether or not it is actually marked as classified. In that regard, several analysts have said in the wake of yesterday’s reports that it would be self-evidence from the nature of the type of information that the Inspector General is talking about that it could have come from anywhere but classified sources and thus should not be transmitted on an unsecure network such as the private server that Clinton had set up to manage her email while Secretary of State. It’s also unclear from the IG’s remarks whether the information was contained in email sent to or by Clinton, or whether it was part of email sent or received by any number of the small handful of people close to Clinton who also had accounts on the private Clinton server, a group that included most of Clinton’s closest advisers such as Huma Abedin.

News like this always sends the conservative blogosphere off on a tangent of potential criminal liability and the possibility of Clinton, or someone close to her, being indicted for mishandling of classified information in much the same way that General David Petraeus was when he was caught sharing information classified as “Top Secret” with the female biographer with whom he was having an affair. It’s important to note, though, that we are at the very least very far away from that happening in this case. For one thing, while this matter is being investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation it’s important to note that the agency has made clear that the present investigation is solely concerned with a broad investigation of whether classified information may have made its way onto Clinton’s server and, if it did, how that happened and how it was handled. There has been no formal announcement or any indication at this point that any individual is being targeted by the FBI or any other agency. Second, it appears that many of the instances in which “classified” information has been found on the server have been instances in which the information was marked as classified after the fact during the course of reviewing the emails before they were released to the public. This would mean that there was no indication that the information in the email was classified at the time it was sent or received. As noted, this doesn’t necessarily relieve a sending or receiving party from culpability for mishandling of classified information, but it does arguably change the nature of the activity in question. Finally, it’s worth noting that this situation differs from the Petraeus case in that, at least from a distance, it appears to involve situations where classified information was being shared between and among people already authorized to have access to it. In the Petraeus case, the General shared information with someone who wasn’t entitled to have it at all since her security clearance did not allow her to have access to the information in question. While this distinction doesn’t necessarily relieve anyone of criminal culpability if the facts justify that, it is an important distinction that makes the attempt to analogize this to the Petraus affair disingenuous.

Leaving aside the issue of criminal culpability, though, any revelation that puts this story back in the news can’t really help Hillary Clinton in either the short or the long term. It was revelations about the email server issue, after all, that helped contribute to the downturn that Clinton’s campaign last summer. She managed to bounce back from those doldrums not the least because there was time for the story to be absorbed by the public in a way that it didn’t do her any long term damage. With the next phase of the campaign about to begin in earnest, though, and Clinton already dealing with the fact that the Democratic race is becoming far more competitive than many believed it would be at this point, this is hardly the ideal time for something like this to come out. Even though there’s little indication that Bernie Sanders’ campaign intends to make a big deal out of these new revelations, they will be hanging out there at a time when Clinton can hardly afford the distraction. Whether that has an impact on the race going forward remains to be seen.

About Doug MataconisDoug holds a B.A. in Political Science from Rutgers University and J.D. from George Mason University School of Law. He joined the staff of OTB in May, 2010 and also writes at Below The Beltway.
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Comments

Yeah. Rod Dreher over at TAC is convinced that this is the killer gun that is going to take Hillary out of the race.

My feeling is no post-facto classification games. If you can’t be bothered to classify it in the beginning, no backsies. One reason why I insist in any NDA I sign that anything to be considered confidential be marked confidential. I don’t want to get into a squabble about “should-have-know”.

There are compartmentalizations which are an add-on to top secret, but to my knowledge there is no classification level higher than TS. They serve to create a finite subset of people with top secret clearance who can access a particular document set.

Ah, some thing that some dudes “consider to be” top secret or above. That proves it!

Let me tell you a story: So Wikileaks happens and a bunch of info starts showing up in the press about some of the shadier things done by our government. A friend and I, then working for the gummint, begin talking about one of these stories, pointing out how crappy it is. A computer security tech pulled us aside and told us we were going to lose our clearances if we didn’t quit sharing “classified information,” i.e., a story from the goddamn Washington Post that had been picked up and reported about on every major cable news network, to which we added nothing but our personal disgust. That’s the kind of idiocy that is happening here. Period.

News like this always sends the conservative blogosphere off on a tangent of potential criminal liability

Oh yeah, this “criminal liability” stuff is definitely a thing on the right. And I get it. Clinton’s private e-mail server is hard to justify, not least because of the possibility of passing classified information, but the leap to “Hillary’s going to jail!” is political nonsense.

Can you imagine any of these conservatives raging against Condi Rice’s private e-mail server, if she had one?

That’s not to say that all criticisms of Clinton’s e-mail shenanigans are in bad faith. But holy hell, so many of them are.

Clinton’s not going to jail. That’s just fantasy. Elites never get punished for anything they do. I mean, hell, we had a dozen people in the Bush Administration who committed or abetted war crimes and they’ve been “punished” with six-figure speaking fees and cushy jobs.

Whether this hurts her primary campaign is another ballgame. Clinton’s been riding the wave of inevitability. Anything that makes her seem less inevitable is a problem.

@Grumpy Realist P.S. And is there anything above Top Secret? This sounds fishy.

No, there isn’t. Generally speaking, classification levels are based on potential damage to national security. Since Top Secret is used to classify the most potentially damaging information, there can’t be a level past that. What people misinterpret as “above top secret” are Special Access restrictions, which compartmentalize the Top Secret data using a list of specific people who are the only ones allowed access. It is only used for Top Secret info that can logically be restricted to a small group.

For example, general data regarding the development of an invisibility field would be classified Top Secret, but the (potentially large) number of people needed to work on the project – planning, designing, developing, testing, etc – would necessitate fairly widespread availability, so that would be it. However, data concerning deployment of the devices – how many, where, who got them, even the fact that operational units actually existed – would be more easily restricted to a smaller group, so would be classified TS with SAP restrictions

@nitpicker: Just because classified information has been shared by the Washington Post does not make it declassified. A news organization is not a declassification authority. All DOD personnel were warned not to view or share information revealed by Snowden to news outlets.

Second, it appears that many of the instances in which “classified” information has been found on the server have been instances in which the information was marked as classified after the fact during the course of reviewing the emails before they were released to the public.

I work with TOP Secret plus compartmented information daily.

marked as classified after the fact

Yes, people reviewing the emails determined they contained classified information and marked them as such. That does not mean the information was not classified before it was transmitted. It didn’t become classified after it was transmitted.

If DOD determines the color Blue is classified, it is classified from that date forward until DOD decides to declassify it. Any discussion of the color Blue by government personnel is classified. Removing classification statements and headers from a document and copying or retransmitting it or retyping it into an email on an unclassified system does not make it unclassified.

The people sending and receiving those emails should have known they were covering classified information. The fact that over 1,300 emails have been determined to be classified shows an inherent lack of “give a damn”.

If you, by your own stupidity, let out your company’s Trade Secret stuff to the world while not labeling it Trade Secret and one of your competitors starts using it,, good luck whining to the courts about the liability of said competitor.

Jack is a Google warrior who tends to get more things incorrect (because he fails to read the entire piece before copy and pasting it) than he gets right. I regularly have fun with him precisely because of this phenomenon.

There is a better chance that I get crowned King of Saudi Arabia than there is that he’s walking around with SCI level clearance.

That having been said, I’m curious as to which specific federal statute(s) Jack believes Clinton to have violated. So, Jack, which statute(s) did she violate (and be specific)?

“There should be no bank too big to fail and no individual too big to jail.” Hillary R. Clinton, 1/18/2016.

Hillary set up her e-mail server for exactly one reason: because she was more worried about her political enemies getting access to them than enemies of the country getting access to them. She essentially said so when she said Republicans were her greatest enemies.

But the laws don’t apply to Clintons, so she’ll skate. Again.

As for the excuse of “it wasn’t classified at the time,’ that’s bullshit. For one, Hillary, by virtue of her position, is expected to know what is considered classified. For another, there’s a record of her ordering one of her aides to strip off the classifications and send the classified material unsecured anyway.

buwahahahahahahahahahaha
No information you ever bring to the table is correct.
Let’s just refer back two days ago when you claimed Obama raised the debt 9% and Bush only 4%.
How do you get thru the day when everything you do is wrong?
Red means go. Right means left. Up means down.
It can’t be easy.
I feel bad for you, man.

And nowhere in the article does it state that the reporter has actually SEEN this letter.

So for all we know, this is yet one more instance of the New York Times taking well-spun nonsense from the Republicans on the committee and reporting it as fact.

I’ll wait for a day or two to see if the Times starts backpedaling as it usually does with these Hillary articles.

Like the one today about how all women are rising up against terrible Hillary for trying to destroy the women who accused her husband and how they’ll all flock to that great feminist Donald Trump because he is the only one to raise the subject — and they find all of two women to even come close to that point, one a 17 year-old blogger and the other Camille Paglia. I’m surprised they didn’t quote Maureen Dowd as long as they were at it…

As a former member of the intelligence community I can tell you there is no classification higher than top secret. Within the top secret classification there is a need to know clause. Not everyone with a top secret clearance can have access to everything.

It’s odd that conservatives who want to outsource everything are absolutely committed to a government monopoly on email. (You’ll have to forgive me for being suspicious of their motives in this instance…)

What is especially funny is that the federal government’s experience with getting hacked and losing supposedly protected data would suggest that one would actually be justified to be skeptical of Uncle Sam’s IT security talents.

Is there any evidence that Clinton’s email server, which she was permitted to have based upon the laws of that time, was ever hacked? If anything, we should be thrilled that Clinton protected us from government incompetence by managing these things on her own. A true free marketeer.

LOL, I see you’ve been hanging out at Red State. They love these two …

EO 13526 does nothing of the sort, and the penalty for violating the terms of this EO would be administrative. not criminal. In other words, she’d potentially risk being terminated (oops, too late, she’s already resigned) and / or the loss of her security clearance (which is immaterial, since, if elected, she’d automatically have access to pretty much everything imaginable on demand).

18 USC 793(f) requires gross negligence resulting in disclosure and / or knowledge of illegal access by unauthorized personnel. Simply conveying classified information back and forth between persons authorized to receive it on an unsecured system, or receiving classified information from persons unauthorized to receive it, doesn’t meet the 793(f) standard.

Sorry to burst your bubble (not really …) but there is no part of this scenario where Clinton is even charged with a crime, much less prosecuted for one. If you’re gleefully waiting for that to happen, you’re in for a disappointment.

My favorite part of the entire thing is that these regulations do not apply to Congress. Congress wants carte blanche access to EXECUTIVE BRANCH internal emails, but it’s determined to prevent any such equivalent access to its own.

@HarvardLaw92: Yeah, no way she’s going to jail. That’s just Republican wishful thinking.

If anything, I’d say her designation as an OCA meant she had a responsibility to at least know from looking at an e-mail whether it could potentially contain information requiring a classification determination. But criminal penalty? I just don’t see it.

@James Pearce: If there are any actual national security concerns, those should be addressed without also trying to bring Clinton down politically. I know, in election season, it will be hard to resist.

Yeah, how the hell you gonna thread THAT needle? All Hillary has to say that it’s political, and all her lickspittles and rumpswabs will latch on to that.

Remember Paula Jones’ civil lawsuit? Bill Clinton tried to get it postponed by claiming that, as Commander In Chief, he was covered by the 1940 Soldiers And Sailors Relief Act, he couldn’t be sued until he was out of office.

And your suggestion of focusing on either defeating her for office or criminally prosecuting her… wouldn’t that be considerate, to take away half her concerns.

And what happened to “it’s the seriousness of the charge that matters?”

@Jack:
Here is exactly what you wrote…my memory of it wasn’t clear. You were talking about raw numbers, not percentages. Raw numbers, absent any context, are absolutely meaningless even if they were right…which they are not.

Over $9T in debt, more than all other presidents combined. I seem to remember Obama claiming that Bush adding $4 trillion to debt was unpatriotic.

Clinton42 left Bush43 a debt of $5.8T to which Bush added $5.85T, or an increase of 101% to the debt.
Bush 43 left a debt of $11.6T to which Obama has added $6.2T or a 53% increase in the debt.
Reagan increased the debt by 190%.
You are wrong. Again. It must be a constant struggle.

@Jenos Idanian:
It’s hilarious to see a lickspittle and rumpswab like you, who vigorously defended Scooter for outing a covert agent, now latch onto some documents that may or may not have been classified and may or may not have been sent to anyone.
Ooooh…a squirrel.BENGHAZI!!!!!

she was more concerned about her political enemies getting access to information that they had every legal right to see and Constitutional obligation to review.

Actually, no. Executive privilege presumes that congressional access to the information is debarred short of a definitive showing by Congress that it requires and merits access. That is a determination for the courts to make. It’s not some unlimited “Congress gets to see whatever it wants” grant of authority.

Wish I agreed. If Trump is nominated, which is beginning to look possible*, he will have a field day with this. Facts and substance be damned. Well, not damned, just regarded as wholly irrelevant. And before he’s nominated he’ll start. His backers will say he’s the only one with the guts to tell the truth about Hillary. Look what he’s been able to do with Cruz’s citizenship.

I hope Hillary has a very good team focus grouping responses to this stuff.
_______
* I debated “likely”, “probable”, etc. and settled on “possible”. Right this minute he’s looking good, but he’s only now coming under press scrutiny and coming under serious attack for the first time. Attacked by Cruz, who was waiting for Trump to self destruct and realized he’s run out of time.

Their primary goal here is to create a stink, in the hope that it will handicap her presidential campaign.

The problem with that one (like so many previous attempts in that regard by Congressional Republicans) is that they have overplayed their hand, to the point where pretty much anyone who isn’t a raving Red Stater has by this point dismissed the scenario as a politically motivated witch hunt.

People like Jack will cling to this one for dear life, hoping and praying it prevents her from being elected, but as I said above, they were never going to vote for her under any circumstances – so, politically speaking from Clinton’s standpoint, who cares what they think?

For those of you not interested in juke’s ego-stroking, he links to a comment of his that links to another comment of his where he cites not Obama taking office, but the beginning of the first fiscal year under his reign, then insists that the money be adjusted for inflation.

Which reminds me that 9/11 happened on Bill Clinton’s watch, if you go by fiscal years, but that’s merely a fun diversion.

Anyway, it’s currently $18.8 trillion, and if one takes juke’s number and starting date, that’s up from 11.9 trillion. So that’s 6.9 trillion. If you go by January 20, it was $10.6 trillion.

Which makes me very suspicious of juke’s saying it went up 1.3 trillion in 9 months. So I’ll double-check that one.

OK, that bears out. I’d forgotten to take into account that the Democrats held Congress at that point.

Which has jack squat with Hillary’s flouting of the laws regarding classified information, but that was the point of bringing it up, wasn’t it?

Absolutely. The reported federal debt number includes intragovernmental debt – in other words debt that he government hypothetically owes to itself – mainly in the form of “trusts” which hold special Treasuries related to OASDI and Medicare, et al.

These are pay as you go programs, funded by incoming dedicated tax revenues as well (in the case of Medicare, especially) from general tax revenues. The original PLs which established these programs mandated that surpluses had to be invested in US government debt (the language is a little more florid, but the end result is that the conditions specified narrow the potential investments to a single option).

So, government collects dedicated tax revenues, government spends the portion necessary for benefits on benefits, “borrows” the rest by selling special Treasuries to the “trust” funds and spends it as general revenue. These special Treasuries accumulate, and are reflected on the federal balance sheet as debt (which is quite fun, when you think about it, because the federal balance sheet also considers them to be assets. GASB is fun …)

Now here’s the salient point – the federal government only has one source from which to pay future benefit payments – current incoming revenue in the general fund. Whether we consider these special Treasuries to have been redeemed, and payments made from the special funds, or cancelled as payments are made from the general fund, the end result is the same – there is no money in these funds, and there is no actual debt in them either (conservation of entries …).

You could wipe out every cent of debt in those “trusts” and you’d still be left with exactly what you already had – pay as you go payments being made out of incoming revenue. Intragovernmental debt is meaningless beyond serving as a scorecard of sorts for the amount of dedicated revenue that Congress has repurposed in the past.

Hard debt, on the other hand, actually has to be repaid to external holders. Bottom line – of the $18,934,589,767,234.96 in reported federal debt (as of yesterday), $5,329,732,254,781.00 essentially doesn’t exist. The actual hard debt owed to external holders is $13,604,857,512,453.96

The hard debt owed to external holders has increased by $7,505,894,097,177.82 between January 21, 2009 and today.

Republicans have controlled at least one branch of Congress for the majority of Obama’s two terms in office (60 out of a total 84 months). If you have a problem with debt accumulation, I’d suggest asking Congress why it happened.

And your suggestion of focusing on either defeating her for office or criminally prosecuting her… wouldn’t that be considerate, to take away half her concerns.

That’s kind of the problem here, Jenos. You really do seem to think that Clinton is really concerned. Why would she be concerned? The right thinks they’re throwing haymakers, but they’re just making hay.

If anything, this is an opportunity to clarify State department IT procedures going forward. It’s not going to be the final chapter in William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of Hillary Clinton. Don’t be a fool.

If you’re really interested in the E-Mail issues, then I suggest heading over to 20 committee. John Schindler does much more in depth review over what’s going on; short version — most news outlets don’t have a clue. In the partisan FWIW, he thinks both parties are total morons so there’s not a party slant. There is, however, an “Intel Wenie” slant — which one should expect from that site.

Short version: Hillary is in real trouble; and depending on how they handle it, possibly the democratic party as well. If she doesn’t go to jail (or at least be punished in some way) people like myself — who would have gone to jail if we had done that — will be seriously ticked. If she does go to jail, then the Democratic Party is in serious trouble. Unless, of course, Sanders takes the lead … but that’s a different kind of trouble for the DP (think “… as Donald Trump is to the Republicans …”).

@Jack: Really? And you’re not concerned about someone sending a link to OTB to the field office responsible for issuing your clearance? Evidence of mental breakdown and/or drug use will generally get it revoked..

Intelligence types will always be peeved by something which is as personal to them as a situation like this must be, and take umbrage if the outcome doesn’t go as they think that it should. I sympathize.

The fact is, though, that there aren’t that many of them, relatively speaking, and they don’t make the decision to prosecute people.

Attorneys like me do, and while this might be difficult to accept, it’s factual nonetheless: The likelihood of Hillary Clinton being prosecuted over anything in this scenario is about as close to zero as one can get without actually being zero. You have a better chance of winning the lottery than she does of being prosecuted. It’s just not going to happen.

P.S. You also have to have the rule/law be defined well enough that people know when they’re breaking it. (Hence all the laws against “vagrancy” that have been shot down as unconstitutional.) Given that the State Dept. and the Intelligence agencies are having a ding-dong catfight even as we speak about whether those silly emails were, in fact, Top Secret, I think you got another problem here.

I must confess I dearly love the “they weren’t classified when she got them” defense. What a great qualification for president — “Vote Hillary! The highlight of her tenure as Secretary of State was that she was too stupid/incompetent to recognize classified information unless it was stamped CLASSIFIED in big red letters. And pay no mind that part of her job was to recognize such information and classify it appropriately.”

“I’m Hillary Clinton, and I’d approve of this message if I could actually read it.”

There’s a heck of a lot of material out there that doesn’t come with titles like “List of our secret agents in Afghanistan”, smart boy. In other words, NO, it is NOT always easily obvious when material should be classified. Especially if it’s compartmentalized information and you’re outside the compartment.

If you want stuff to be Confidential, then label it so. This “well, you should have knows” is nothing more than an ass-covering attempt by lazy bureaucrats to save themselves.

@HarvardLaw92: Surely there exists a prosecutor that is so devoted to the destruction of Clinton’s career, and so unconcerned with her own, that it’s only a matter of time before Clinton is prosecuted.

The sole instance where I can possibly see her being charged, and this is unbelievably remote, is a scenario where there is convincing evidence that she’s violated some tenet of the National Security Act. she loses the election for the presidency and whichever AG the Republican winner selects decides to go after her.

In the current scenario, it wouldn’t matter if a rogue US attorney decided to roll the dice and go after her – US Attorneys are inferior officers within the context of Article II, and 28 U.S.C. § 519 specifically empowers the US Attorney General as their superior. If one did decide to do so, Lynch would shut him or her down in short order.

They would also be playing beat the clock in the first scenario. The statute of limitations on most federal criminal offenses, including NSA violations not related to the explicit support of terrorism, is 5 years, and the earliest that such a prosecution could begin would be post Senate confirmation of the new AG & US attorneys, which would be January of 2017 (being generous …). They would be limited to events which occurred between January of 2012 and the date of her resignation.

Honestly, it’s just a non-starter, because even the Republican in Congress don’t expect her to be prosecuted. They want to prevent her from being elected, nothing more.

Don’t Blame Obama for Bush’s 2009 Deficit … The 2009 fiscal year began October 1, 2008, nearly four months before Obama took office. The budget for the entire fiscal year was largely set in place while Bush was in the White House.

Honestly, it’s just a non-starter, because even the Republican in Congress don’t expect her to be prosecuted. They want to prevent her from being elected, nothing more.

AND they want to fundraise from this. Fundraising may in fact be their top priority. As long as they can send “STOP EVIL HILLARY! SEND CA$H!” emails to the mailing list of people who bought Sarah Palin’s deathless (ghostwritten) prose, they’re golden.

I don’t know if the rest of you have noticed but in the last couple days these things have come out:
~ The deficit hawks in the Republican Congress raised the deficit for the first time since 2009, Bush’s last budget year. So much for Obama’s out of control spending.
~ Undocumented immigrants are at the lowest numbers since 2003, and the number of undocumented immigrants has fallen each year since 2008. Again, Obama took office in 2009. So much for the uncontrolled flow of illegals crossing the border.
~ 2015 was the hottest year in the historical record. So much for the Climate Change Hoax. The only hoax is Republicans denial of AGW.
How can intelligent, thinking people actually vote for Republicans, when absolutely everything they say is wrong???

But I think it’s interesting that the Republicans in Congress, as well as the various right-wing commentators not only want to prevent Clinton from being elected, but they also want their supporters to believe she may be convicted.

Odd how none of the Clinton lickspittles care about her lies about this whole mess. Remember when she said she had only one e-mail account? Busted — she had at least two. Remember when she said she refused a state.gov address because she only had one device? Busted — there is photographic proof of her using a Blackberry, an IPhone, and an IPad during the times involved.

I guess she forgot those details, just like she forgot how to recognize material that should be classified unless it’s marked IN BIG RED LETTERS “CLASSIFIED.”

But she’s still wicked smart, and totally qualified to be president. And since Republicans would have benefited from her telling the truth, she was not only justified, but morally obligated to lie repeatedly.

Remember, folks: it’s not a lie if the truth might help Republicans. That law trumps all others, even those pesky “don’t lie under oath” ones.

Lest any people new here become confused by the seemingly unchallenged assertion that Hillary should have recognized these emails as being classified, the only such emails actually uncovered concerned a discussion about an article that appeared in the Washington post. Now the armchair secretary of states here might think such stuff was obviously classified，but the rest of us would have assumed the opposite. And remember that highly public article was only deemed classified after the emails were written.

@MarkedMan: That’s what really pisses me off. I really really hate this post-facto “oops, we’re gonna make this CLASSIFIED now that we’ve carelessly let it loose all over the intelligence community and forgotten to indicate anywhere on this that it might contain sensitive information.”

And getting upset about an email discussing an article that appeared in the WP? Um, dudes–at that point you’re just pretending that the horse ain’t stolen.

(If the Intelligence community was forced to treat its “intelligence” the same way patent applicants were forced to treat their own inventions, we wouldn’t have this problem. You let the info out? You lose.

I’m not sure it would be possible to have less of an actual understanding of the issue than you do, but still be aware of it. Classified information in an email is a problem for the author, not the recipient. Which email address that Clinton was using is irrelevant in this situation, as secretary@state.gov is equally insecure. If there was evidence she had sent information in an email that was classified *at that time*, then this story would be newsworthy. Given the lack of anything approaching that, it’s obvious the GOP has nothing here.

At most this appears to be an ongoing classification disagreement between the State Dept and the IG. Given that Hillary Clinton was the first Secretary of State to really use email, there could be an evaluation of how that is working and what IT processes need to be updated, but that’s not really about Clinton personally, and won’t lead to an indictment…

And again, we now have another news article that completely refutes the original article that contained the vague accusations against Hillary Clinton.

The Republicans keep saying the media is in the tank for the Democrats and Hillary Clinton, but then the media keeps regurgitating these nonsense accusations from the GOP. And when the nonsense collapses, it’s a small correction, and then the media goes back to the GOP for more. Odd behavior if they are trying to help Hillary Clinton.

If DOD determines the color Blue discussing the qualities of classification is classified, it is classified from that date forward until DOD decides to declassify it. Any discussion of the color Blue qualities of classification by government personnel is classified. Removing Discussion of classification statements and headers from a document and copying or retransmitting it or retyping it into an email or a blog post on an unclassified system does not make it unclassified.

The people sending and receiving those emails posting on those blogs should have known they were covering classified information. The fact that over 1,300 emails more that five posts on a single blog thread have been determined to be may become classified shows an inherent lack of “give a damn”.

Now here’s the salient point – the federal government only has one source from which to pay future benefit payments – current incoming revenue in the general fund. Whether we consider these special Treasuries to have been redeemed, and payments made from the special funds, or cancelled as payments are made from the general fund, the end result is the same – there is no money in these funds, and there is no actual debt in them either (conservation of entries …).

That’s where you went off the rails. Dollar balances exist in them just as they exist in reserve accounts. You’ve also got your book-keeping wrong; the accounts are a private-sector asset, government-sector liability. Debt and money are the same thing.

General Hayden and the CIA have cleared these following comments for today’s hearing. During her employment at the CIA, Ms. Wilson was undercover. Her employment status with the CIA was classified information.

@Just ‘nutha ig’rant cracker: No, that’s not how it works. The difference being, having been a member if the Intelligence Community for 35 years, I know what I can and cannot discuss, what is and is not classified.

Um, no. There is no public property interest inherent in either program. The reserve funds exist within Treasury, and are reported as assets on the federal books from the standpoint of being hypothetical reserves for the payment of future benefits. That doesn’t imply that there is any actual value to them.

The fact remains that there is but one source of funding available to satisfy benefit payments – incoming tax revenues. The “reserves” are meaningless. Remove incoming revenue from the equation and then try to pay benefits with the “assets” in those reserve funds. They were a way to sell a backdoor tax increase to pay for New Deal spending to the public without having to call it a tax increase. They did that so effectively that even today, the average American thinks OASDI functions like an annuity.

I am responsible for any classified that I receive on my work computer. You know, the account the government makes me use for government business. If I receive classified information, that account and the server is scrubbed to remove said information.

She chose to use a personal account that she designated for SecState business. Therefore yes, she is responsible fo classified information being sent to/from that account. There are over 1300 emails to date that have been deemed classified.

The description of the emails as relatively innocuous came from officials, including a senior U.S. intelligence official, who believe Inspector General McCullough has been unfair to Clinton in his handling of the issue. They say McCullough and Congressional Republicans have elevated a mundane dispute about classification into a scandal.

No GOOD reason to put Hill-Billy back in the White House. Will Hillary start chasing interns?
I doubt it but what did she do as NY Senator or Sec’y of State? Not much good. We don’t need a President who accomplishes NOTHING GOOD as President.

More than 1,200 emails from Hillary Clinton’s private server during her time at the State Department have now been deemed classified, after the agency publicly released its eighth batch of the messages late Thursday.

@Robin Cohen: Even if your snark were true, a candidate who would, per the Hippocratic Oath, do no harm, would be hugely preferable to any of the GOPs running. Any one of them would be as bad as W or worse: neocon foreign policy, deficit busting tax cuts, anti-environmentalism, and lightly veiled racism.

1) If I receive an email that for some reason later becomes classified, I am still responsible for disclosing to base computer personnel that said email is on my computer. The difference being, the base would likely know by searching the server. They would then contact the Computer System Admins of everyone that received said emails and have those accounts locked until the emails are located and destroyed.

The problem is, Hillary bypassed government oversight by using her own server and the server hardware was in her possession with classified information contained within.

2) what are the odds people she is emailing or that emailed her were in possession of information they didn’t know was classified and then decided to email one another. I know the types of information which are classified. She did as well. Especially the SAP information.

Chuckled when I first read this post. The reason is that I was then listening to an entertaining radio drama podcast called The Black Tapes. The heroine is an investigative reporter looking into issues of the “mysterious and the paranormal.” There is as much chance of that reporter finding substantive truth there as there is of something substantive coming out of this “Clinton email” nonsense.
Plainly, this has become to conservatives just as much a “white whale” was Whitewater was in the 90s. I have lost count of the number of times I’ve read a conservative commenter say Clinton should be “in jail” about this. None of those commenters have said what it is that she actually did that deserved jail time. ( Pro tip: lying about whether you have one smartphone or two isn’t a criminal offense, or even an offense at all).
Meanwhile for those concerned about dishonesty, the Republican presidential candidates tell bigger lies every day of the week (“I will build a wall to Mexico and have Mexico pay for it!These tax cuts will pay for themselves! I have a secret plan to wipe out ISIS! We will repeal Obamacare and replace it with a better plan that I can’t share with you right now! Obama has left the economy worse than he found it!”) Compared to those guys, Hillary’s fibs are minor league. That’s why, Jenos, this email stuff doesn’t resonate outside the right-wing bubble. Inside the right wing bubble, though, “Send me money so I stop Hillary” remains a reliable way of raising funds, so the hunt for the smoking email will continue.

@David M: As I mentioned yesterday. We in the intel community were told we were not allowed to view, share, etc., either on personal or work computers, any of the Snowden related articles that contained classified information.

I remember receiving an email to this effect.

Classified information, whether or not already posted on public websites, disclosed to the media, or otherwise in the public domain remains classified and must be treated as such until it is declassified by an appropriate U.S. government authority. It is the responsibility of every DoD employee and contractor to protect classified information and to follow established procedures for accessing classified information only through authorized means.

And as far as Hillary running two separate e-mail accounts, I shouldn’t have to explain to this crowd how to lawyer that into lying.

1) Congress discovers she was using the e-mail address “hdr22@clintone-mail.com” for official business and subpoenas all official correspondence using that account.

2) Hillary complies with that subpoena, and announces that she has turned over everything they want, so case closed.

3) Hillary’s official correspondence under the account “HRod17@clintonemail.com,” including Sid Blumenthal’s attempts to lobby her about Libya on behalf of his employers, remains undiscovered.

The multiple accounts (we know of two, but who the hell knows how many more she might have had?) furthered the main purpose of having her own private e-mail server: to evade Congressional oversight that is part of the whole checks and balances thing that is a cornerstone of the Constitution.

But the Constitution doesn’t apply when it means it might help Republicans. The Founding Fathers forgot to make that explicit, but it’s in there. Really. Just ask Obama or any other leading Democrat.

Classified information, whether or not already posted on public websites, disclosed to the media, or otherwise in the public domain remains classified and must be treated as such until it is declassified by an appropriate U.S. government authority

Now you tell us. I seem to remember about a zillion prominent wingnuts claiming it was perfectly fine for Cheney et al to out Plame because (allegedly) she had already been outed by someone else. I guess they didn’t get the memo, huh?

@jukeboxgrad: Are you suggesting that a rule is no longer a rule because someone else has broken said rule? Good to know. That will come in handy if I decide to run guns to Mexican cartels and expect to NOT be prosecuted.

there is photographic proof of her using a Blackberry, an IPhone, and an IPad during the times involved.

Clinton became Secretary of State in 2009, and the first iPad was released in 2010. The iPhone was released before 2009, but it’s a reasonable assumption that it wasn’t immediately adopted by governmental agencies. So her statement is believable, given that the email was set up when she took office, not several years later.

When you show me your posts criticizing Cheney for outing Plame, I’ll apologize to you for making an incorrect assumption. Also, find a child who can help you understand the meaning of the word “collective.”

Sure. Except for some reason it’s important to you to post here, and you’re attempting to back up your moronic statements with some claim to expertise, and with the possible exception of the house trolls and the illiterates, no one here believes you.

And that should have absolutely no effect on the rest of your life — but I’d think it would make you reconsider your strategy on this site.

Because what’s the point of posting your drivel if everyone dismisses it as gibberish before you’ve even finished typing?

@WR: I think you have been spending too much time with Clavin. The fact that I cannot print my clearance and post it here is your basis to say I don’t have a clearance.

The fact I retired from the Air Force and that I was a Russian linguist is simply not verifiable without providing you too much personal information. The fact that I parlayed that experience into a defense contractor job, is simply not verifiable without exposing too much personal information. The fact that I today have a TS/SCI clearance with multiple caveats is simply not verifiable without providing too much personal information.

So, therefore, to you , I do not nor have not done any of those things.

@jukeboxgrad: So, the fact that Obama said repeatedly “If you like you plan, you can keep your plan.’ and “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.” even though he knew at the time he was saying it that it was not true, was an assertion.

Only liberals feel the need to change definition of words…daily…to fit their changing views of the world.

what are the odds people she is emailing or that emailed her were in possession of information they didn’t know was classified and then decided to email one another. I know the types of information which are classified. She did as well. Especially the SAP information.

There are several problems with your claims here. First, it ignores the fact that the State Department and the IG have an ongoing disagreement about what should be classified. Secondly, it maintains the fiction that the SAP designation about a news article regarding drones is something that should be taken seriously. And finally, for this to be an actual scandal, she needs to have sent classified information, simply receiving it will never matter.

So having multiple email accounts , or multiple mobile devices, is unlawful and presumptive evidence that you are evading Congressional oversight!
Good to know. Dude, you do know that there are thousands of government employees (and millions of Americans) who have multiple email accounts and more than one mobile devices, right?
This is a classical example of the Clinton Rules.

the Clinton rules are driven by reporters’ and editors’ desire to score the ultimate prize in contemporary journalism: the scoop that brings down Hillary Clinton and her family’s political empire. At least in that way, Republicans and the media have a common interest.

1) Everything, no matter how ludicrous-sounding, is worthy of a full investigation by federal agencies, Congress, the “vast right-wing conspiracy,” and mainstream media outlets

Doug ‘s series of posts, and the right wing commenters’ reactions are proof positive of this rule. There is nothing at all to this email “scandal”, except that Clinton had a private email server and she may have lied about whether she had two mobile devices. Neither of those things are illegal and the second isn’t even newsworthy, yet somehow, this is for the right wing proof positive that the dastardly Clintons are up to something and are being allowed to get away with murder.And of course, the lack of evidence is just proof that the conspiracy is true and the rot goes deeper than anyone has imagined. I’m waiting for the grand theory that links fluoridation, the grassy knoll, Vincent Foster’s death, and the emails deleted from the Clinton server…

I might add that this approach to the Clintons( “Look at the latest shiny thing!”) just infantilizes all discussion of the Clinton the candidate. I’ve yet to see Doug or any OTB poster do a deep dive on any of Clinton’s policy positions. Instead there has been repeated posts on email BS- following a series of posts about speaker fees (remember when that was the hotness?). And of , there was, is, and always will be BENGHAZI!!!
Hopefully, there will be substantive discussion of the Clinton policy platform to come.

@stonetools: There’s one option that might put all this to rest, one option that Hillary has yet to try, one so simple and crazy that it just might work:

JUST TELL THE FSCKING TRUTH.

Every time she’s caught in a lie, the retreats behind another lie. Here’s a good example — Hillary tells the House Committee that she only had one personal e-mail address, promise, and here’s all the stuff. Then they find out about a second one, and that one she promises that she didn’t use it while she was in office, it was only used after she left office. Then we find out that she used it when she was Secretary of State.

And that’s not even touching on how she was passing along to her subordinates at State Libyan “intelligence” from Sid Blumenthal, who at the time was collecting paychecks from Media Matters, American Bridge, The Clinton Foundation, and contractors wanting to make money out of post-Khadafy Libya.

I understand that you cheerfully swallow each and every single iteration of “OK, here’s the truth this time, now just drop it” and willfully forget the previous times you’ve swallowed it, but you don’t get to insist that everyone else be as willfully stupid and gullible as you insist you are.

@stonetools: Hopefully, there will be substantive discussion of the Clinton policy platform to come.

“If you loved what she did for Libya, if you adore how she got along with Russia, and you think North Korea’s nukes are the cutest thing since kittens and babies videos, then you’ll just LOVE what she does when she’s president! Vote Hillary — because she’s already made things so bad, they can only get better!”

@David M: Sid Vicious? The guy who had the Secretary of State’s ear, despite being blackballed by Obama, and lobbied her about Libya with info supplied by guys who wanted to make big bucks there?

The e-mails show that Hillary passed along his messages to her subordinates with instructions to take them seriously, so the people paying him certainly got their money’s worth.

This guy was on the payroll of American Bridge, Media Matters, the Clinton Foundation (along with a clintonemail.com account of his very own), and was selling his access to Hillary. The question is, why do you not think it’s a big deal that one of Hillary’s most trusted advisors was giving her the info he was being paid to give her, and she was passing it along to her underlings at State without informing them that the source had a YUUUUGE financial interest in Libya?

If you loved what she did for Libya, if you adore how she got along with Russia, and you think North Korea’s nukes are the cutest thing

Let’s see – Gaddafi, mass murderer of Americans, six feet under instead of living in luxury. Russia? Remind me, when is that last time our relationship with them was not adversarial. North Korea? Already had nukes.

Dude , nobody -apart from you and Doug-cares about this stuff. NO ONE. Whether Clinton had two mobile devices or not is irrelevant to her duties as SoS or her qualifications as President. How do we know? In 11 hours of questioning from Republicans who absolutely wanted to destroy Clinton, these questions never came up.This is what the committee leader had to say about Clinton’s emails:

On Fox News Sunday, Trey Gowdy admitted what we’ve known all along – that Secretary Clinton’s use of her email is not relevant to Gowdy’s investigation into the Benghazi tragedy.

Chris Wallace asked, “What does this have to do with investigating what happened around Benghazi?”

Trey Gowdy responded, “Well, probably not much of anything…”

IOW, there’s nothing there. The Republicans in Congress know it and indeed all upright walking bipeds know it. However, those in the right wing fever swamps are still holding out hope. Maybe it’s time you move on too.

I’ll assume your unsourced allegations are lacking substance for the same reason that the GOP won’t release the transcripts of his testimony. There actually isn’t anything there, and it’s another fake scandal.

So let’s see – you work in the intelligence community, you have a top secret clearance, and you spend your time bragging about your clearance and making comments about beastality and sexual abuse of children in public view.

I’m thinking that if I was your supervisor and I saw this stuff, a psych eval might be in order.

And again, we now have another news article that completely refutes the original article that contained the vague accusations against Hillary Clinton.

When I saw that the original article was from the New York Times, I wondered how long it would take. I don’t know what exactly the Clintons did that the entire NYT staff to become their enemies, but man does the Times hold a grudge. Have they gotten a single story about Hillary Clinton right?

@stonetools: Dude , nobody -apart from you and Doug-cares about this stuff. NO ONE.

You’re pretty right. No one here cares. Which is not surprising, because that would require you to actually follow your ethics and principles.

Hillary has repeatedly lied about very significant matters solely for her personal political gain, often to the detriment of national security. That sort of thing should be reprehensible to you and yours, but since it’s Hillary, you give her a pass.

@Jack: “So, the fact that Obama said repeatedly “If you like you plan, you can keep your plan.’ and “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.” even though he knew at the time he was saying it that it was not true, was an assertion.”

See? Jack has such an incredibly high security clearance that he even is allowed to know what is going on inside the president’s head!!!!

@C. Clavin:
Hey, so I’m a Democrat and we would probably agree on a lot of political topics. That said, I love reading OTB comment threads (as a lurker), but for a couple of things; one of them is your comments. You do realize that while you may be right on a lot of things, your battle with Jenos/other trolls comes across as juvenile? The name-calling, the constant contentless posts asserting the other’s inferiority, they’re just annoying. They are one of the lease intelligent things in the comments on OTB’s generally intelligent conversation – along with obviously wrong republican shills of course. (I don’t expect as much of them). So do realize, these red downticks on your comments, they’re not just from ideological opponents. Cheers. Now I’ll go back to lurking.

@David M: The latest reports now say that the “Top Secret/SAP” info was detailed intelligence from an undercover agent — the kind of info that, if divulged, could get that agent identified and killed. And quite possibly his/her family, depending on the regime he/she was working under.

I now expect all the people who keep bringing up Valerie Plame to drop everything and do some frantic digging to find some way of making Hillary’s breach far less important than that case. Or, more likely, to sneeringly dismiss the comparison and do all they can to ignore it.

@Jenos Idanian: Hi, I kind of expected this, but please do not co-opt my post. Your posts are one of the other “but for a couple things”.

BTW, talking about feces isn’t ignoring. Not posting about how you are ignoring someone is ignoring.

I was thinking about the comments section a couple of minutes ago and the word “Playground” came to mind.

Some advice for you: wait until news is cold off the press before making large assertions (re: your reply to David M). Often news gets more nuanced. Also, the “you are all hypocrites!!” assertions, I think people heard you by now.

The latest reports now say that the “Top Secret/SAP” info was detailed intelligence from an undercover agent — the kind of info that, if divulged, could get that agent identified and killed. And quite possibly his/her family, depending on the regime he/she was working under.

Did you even read that article? Anonymous source, Fox News, no assertion that the info was actually marked when Hillary received it, generic speculation about how damaging info in that category might be, hypothetically, if it were really in that category, lather, rinse, repeat. Fallon’s assertion that the information was unmarked repeated for form’s sake at the bottom.

There is no assertion here that the info was marked TS/SAP (or anything else) when Hillary received it. The only new info here is from sources that either don’t have access to the info they claim, or are violating their security oaths by leaking this information anonymously. To Fox News, that bastion of objectivity and fairness.

@DrDaveT: There is no assertion here that the info was marked TS/SAP (or anything else) when Hillary received it.

You should have stuck with the “unverified at this point” argument — I’d have been stuck with the “we’ll have to wait and see what deevelops” rebuttal.

But you went with the “marked when she received it” argument. That’s a legal technicality that could prove crucial in a criminal trial (and entirely consistent with the Clintons’ history of lawyering everything they can). But she’s not on trial here, she’s running for president. And people in as high as a position as Secretary of State are expected (hell, I think even required) to recognize such sensitive information on sight, and act accordingly.

And for someone running using her record and her intelligence as her main qualifications (as well as “I’m a woman and I’m married to Bill Clinton” subtext, but that’s not relevant in this case), pleading ignorance on such matters as the proper handling of such highly sensitive information ought to be disqualifying.

It wasn’t for me — I was already against her for a host of other reasons — but I see it as affirmation that I made the right call.

Why do you want a president who does not know how to recognize highly sensitive information on her own, but has to have it spelled out to her each and every single time? And what happens should her aides forget to spell out to her just how critical it is that certain information be kept very, very secure?

people in as high as a position as Secretary of State are expected (hell, I think even required) to recognize such sensitive information on sight

As usual, you are making a claim that is ignorant nonsense. If the classification status of every document was always inherently obvious, then we would not have an elaborate system for marking documents. Classification is a choice, and it happens because someone made a decision. Being “in as high as a position as Secretary of State” does not magically enable you to recognize that a certain name or number or fact has a particular classification status. That status was assigned by a certain person for a certain reason, and the reason might be known to them and not to someone else.

@jukeboxgrad: To expand on this, government agencies and departments are far from unified in their judgments of what merits classification. There is a set of guidelines published for OCAs (Original Classifying Authorities) and being guidelines, rather than hard rules, they are interpreted differently by different organizations (which necessarily means by different individuals). While IMHO Mrs. Clinton, as an OCA, could be expected to know what DoS considered “classifiable,” remember she did not generate this stuff, it was sent TO her. Having received it from people who likely had responsibilities as derivative classifiers but did not classify the items in question, it’s not too surprising she didn’t raise any concerns.

And, as usual, you are “refuting” me by using gross generalities and conditionals that simply don’t apply.

Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, and had a background of being a US Senator and First Lady. If she was remotely qualified to hold all those positions, and had a modicum of intelligence, then she should have known that “sources and methods” are some of the most sensitive materials she would have access to, and whether or not they were marked as such, she is expected to recognize them and protect them. And by “protect them,” I mean “take measures to keep them away from our nation’s enemies,” not “hide them from those legally and Constitutionally mandated to oversee and review her official conduct.”

Your defense of Hillary is designed to get her out of a criminal conviction on a technicality — basically, that she was too ignorant to have the knowledge to realize how wrong her actions are. What you pretend to not notice is that argument is completely antithetical to her preferred qualifications for president — her intelligence and experience.

Not everyone is as willfully obtuse are you are — you have no problem reconciling “not aware enough to know what is the most sensitive material” and “smart and experienced enough to be president.” And for some reason, you insist that everyone should be as obtuse as you are.

Odd that you keep signaling out Hillary Clinton for criminal charges, rather than the authors of the email messages you are so worked up about. That seems to be pretty good evidence you don’t understand the issue at all.

@David M: She’s the one who set up the private server and insisted that all her official correspondence be sent out of the secure government system, so she not only was in possession of the documents, she was the one who required they be sent there.

The people who sent her the messages were carrying out her directives. Also, they aren’t running for president citing their intelligence and experience as qualifications.

Once again, you show what a raging egomaniac you are. You comment infrequently, but you expect others to treat your words as Holy Writ and commit them to memory. Especially those you go out of your way to treat rudely.

It was your ego that prompted my response to your diversion about the debt. I was wondering just how many layers of your own comments you’d invoke. Your comment (1) had a link to another commment of yours (2) which had a link to a comment of yours (3) that finally linked to your source material.

You comment rarely, and most of the time it’s to insult others. Why the hell do you think that they would make any effort at all to recall what you said a couple of months ago?

Personally, my response is usually “oh, look the snide prick who talks like he’s paid by Media Matters to comment is being snotty again.”

And I got your point: you think that Hillary’s legalistic defense here — that it wasn’t explicitly marked as classified, so it’s not her fault that the very sensitive material was being stored on her extremely insecure home server — actually enhances her qualifications. I just happen to disagree with it. I think that the defense boils down to her saying that she was not intelligent or experienced enough to recognize just how incredibly sensitive that material was unless someone essentially held her by the hand and said “now, Madame Secretary, this is very, very important and should be only kept on computers where the government can protect them with government-level software and major legal penalties for even trying to get access to it.”

We don’t let the director of Fort Knox take gold bars home and protect them in his home safe. We don’t let National Guardsmen take their tanks home after their weekends of duty. David Petraeus was convicted of mishandling less sensitive information in a less risky way. (He let one unauthorized person access to hard copies; Hillary had digital info on a server very vulnerable to hackers.)

You know what would make your life easier, as well as others? If you set up an archive of all your comments, searchable by date, topic, and original site, and allowed others to access it. Wisdom as profound as yours needs to be made as widely as possible. You could call it “The Gospel According to jukeboxgrad.” You could even hold quizzes to see who has best learned The Words Of The Masters.

If they ever made an Americanized version of Harry Potter, you’d make a wonderful Gilderoy Lockhart.

I think that the defense boils down to her saying that she was not intelligent or experienced enough to recognize just how incredibly sensitive that material was…Hillary had digital info on a server very vulnerable to hackers.

The “incredibly sensitive information” we are talking about to date were references to news paper articles. No one had to hack her server to get the information. They could just read the Washington Post. You are accusing others of legalistic defense, when your allegation rests on her receiving (not sending) information freely available from a variety of newspapers. How does that in any way compromise national security? Seriously, explain how her receiving info from a WaPo article and not immediately wiping from her server make us less safe as a nation. Will the terrorists that have been on the receiving end of our drone strikes finally learn that the US has a drone program from hacking HRC’s server?

@anjin-san: Go fondle your guns, annie. Resorting to argument by authority? And no real credentials to back them up? I’d ask if that’s the best you got, but it obviously is.

I don’t make arguments based on “just listen to me, I know what I’m talking about.” I’ve even gone out of my way to make the opposite case — in this case, arguing that Hillary Clinton sure as hell ought to know the basics of what I know.

And who’s the successful writer living in Manhattan? I know Mr. reynolds is a successful writer, but I thought he lived in California. Is Richard Castle a commenter here?

Ah, you’ve brought your A-game, unimpressive as it is. Afraid my guns have been in an unopened safe for a number of years. I enjoy target shooting, but have other things going on at this point in my life that burn up the daylight once spent at the range. Not sure what the fascination is for you in me being a gun owner. You are like the slow kid in the eighth grade that is sure he has come up with a clever putdown, and is too wrapped up in the sound of his own voice to notice everyone rolling their eyes when he speaks.

Of course as a conservative, you would not understand that there are guys who like guns, but don’t need them as manhood boosters

And I’m not resorting to “argument by authority”, simply pointing out that successful, informed people are more likely to give weight to the opinions of other successful informed people – in this case, WR – than to a sad little trollboy such as yourself.

Lot’s of people want to be writers, damn few of them become successful TV writers. I get gigs from time to time that pay me $600 a day to churn out copy, I would sure love to be down in Hollywood making many times that.

@WR: And exactly which of your myriad wonderful accomplishments changes the essential fact that Hillary had highly-sensitive information on her private e-mail server, put there at her command, and her defense is that she wasn’t competent and experienced enough to recognize that it was that highly sensitive unless someone wrote “IT IS REALLY IMPORTANT THAT THIS REMAIN SECRET” on it in big letters?

@anjin-san: So, what has this nobody and miserable failure achieved here?

I’ve taken a bunch of soi-disant superior people and gotten them to tie themselves into knots to avoid the very uncomfortable truths of just how much of a fraud Hillary Clinton is. I’ve found that, for all your self-proclaimed talents and achievements and abilities, you can’t concoct a plausible explanation for her acts (which would be — and have been — criminal when carried out by others.) So you resort to trying to tear down my ego and self-esteem, try to make this into some kind of personal pissing match, determined that you all have far, far bigger dicks than I can ever dream of possessing for daring to disagree with you.

And, as far as I can tell, for daring to be right.

Let’s just assume, for one moment, that everything you have said about your achievements and my utter lack of any. Of your brilliance and my overwhelming stupidity. Of your utter superiority and my total inferiority.

With all those advantages, why the hell am I the one who has to keep hauling out the original topic and repeating the same points that you keep ignoring?

Perhaps you ought to go back to all those wonderful places where you have such unending successes while you can still pretend that they make you superior in everything you try. Hell, get together in meatspace and have a grand time stroking each others… egos…. about how wonderful you all are.

Once again, you do not understand the issue. Email is not secure, end of story. Messages on her private sever were no less secure than messages sent to a state.gov address, because any regular email system is not appropriate for classified information. She absolutely did nothing wrong, unless she sent material that was classified *at that time* through email.

So now at we’ve established you don’t understand what’s going on, we can move into how your dishonestly attempting to make the “classified” information seem nefarious, when you most likely know it’s not. The material in question is most accurately described as forwarded news articles or information the State Dept and the IG disagree on whether it should be classified at all.

I’m glad to clear this up for you, hopefully it will help you to start to actually understand the issue.

@David M: Oh, how thoughtful of you. I should repay the favor. Let me explain to you how such public information can be very useful to other nations. And I’ll use a ridiculous example because… well, I feel like it.

Some newspaper in northern Africa publishes an article that Khadafy has Obama’s Kenyan birth certificate, and will trade it for US assistance in fighting his rebels. Someone State diplomat forwards the article to Hillary, and she responds “find out who leaked this and deal with them.” The actual article isn’t and can’t be classified, but the very fact that the US government is very concerned about it says that the US thinks it’s very serious. Especially if it’s followed by the US actively working on overthrowing Khadafy.

Knowing what the US government considers worth paying attention to is a huge insight into what they are thinking about and what they are doing. For a less ludicrous example, imagine some Long Beach newspaper published an article that the Glomar Explorer was sailing to some middle-of-nowhere spot in the Pacific northeast of Midway. No biggie, but imagine someone sent a copy of the article to the CIA… and the Soviets found out that the CIA was interested in that article. It wouldn’t take much for the Soviets to remember that they lost a sub somewhere around there, and the US might be trying to salvage stuff from the wreck. Congrats — that unclassified newspaper article (or, more specifically, the fact that the US government found it so interesting) has just blown one of the greatest intelligence coups of the Cold War.

Knowing what a body is treating as important and serious and what it does not care about is a huge advantage.

Here’s NBC News saying that its sources confirm what Fox reported. And here’s one paragraph that will be seized upon by Hillary defenders as exonerating her:

Unlike the CIA, State does most of its business over an unclassified email system, and many officials do not have easy access to a classified messaging system.

“Many officials do not have easy access to a classified messaging system” means that some do. Hell, “many” is vague enough to even by a minority of them. But even assuming that “many” means “most” in this context, that means that some do.

Ya think that the head of the State Department and those charged with keeping her informed might be on that list? Or is the classified messaging system reserved only for mid-level techno weenies, with the people at the top and bottom are stuck with the risky stuff?

@Jenos Idanian: The part you’re missing is that the parties involved–the IG doing the investigation and the State Department–do not agree the information in question merits classification. The IG says it should have been, State says it wasn’t necessary.

So if State–which has been granted Original Classifying Authority by the President–does not judge a piece of information merits classification, it won’t be marked as classified when it’s transmitted. Because in the judgment of a Presidentially-authorized OCA, it didn’t need to be.

@Jenos Idanian: Little boy: Classification is not an eternal verity. It is a status applied to various pieces of information by various government agencies for various reasons. And unless it is actually deemed classified, it’s not in fact classified. Which means that there is no standard for something that someone thinks should be classified but isn’t marked as such.

You are inventing a standard for Hillary Clinton which applies to no one in the universe, and which you apply to no one in the universe.

And then you throw your little tantrum and call people hypocrites when they refuse to accept your nonsensical standard.

None of which changes the fact that you are a sad little man with no accomplishments in his life whose only pleasure is annoying people on the internet.

@Jenos Idanian: “No biggie, but imagine someone sent a copy of the article to the CIA… and the Soviets found out that the CIA was interested in that article. It wouldn’t take much for the Soviets to remember that they lost a sub somewhere around there, and the US might be trying to salvage stuff from the wreck. Congrats — that unclassified newspaper article (or, more specifically, the fact that the US government found it so interesting) has just blown one of the greatest intelligence coups of the Cold War.”

So in Benos-world, the first amendment means that newspapers can print whatever they want, but if anyone then discusses that article they are committing a crime and should be sent to prison.

@Jenos Idanian:
Again, your allegation rests on her receiving (not sending) information freely available from a variety of newspapers. How does that in any way compromise national security? I’m not asking about some made up hypothetical, but about the actual article that was referenced.
Seriously, explain how her receiving info from that WaPo article and not immediately wiping from her server make us less safe as a nation. Will the terrorists that have been on the receiving end of our drone strikes finally learn that the US has a drone program from hacking HRC’s server?
Stop trying to tap dance around the issue and answer how the specific incident we know about harmed the US in any way whatsoever.

@Jenos Idanian:
The classified material in question was a newspaper article sent to Clinton and you have definitely implied that she should be prosecuted for it. WR is wrong in that you don’t think ANYONE should go to jail for discussing it. You apparently only think CERTAIN people should go to jail for discussing it.
Your motives here appear more partisan than practical.

@Grewgills: @David M: We don’t know what the information is that’s being cited; that’s the whole point. And you seem to be insisting that if the information was from unclassified sources, it was no big deal. That’s bullshit, and here’s one way it could play out, based on one of the theories of what was actually going down in Benghazi. I feel a bit whimsical, so I’ll do it in a moderately creative way.

“So, Yuri, what do you have for me today?”

“Premier Putin, we have a news report from the Mideast that the Benghazi consulate was actually a cover for a CIA operation.”

“Really? What kind of operation?”

“That the CIA was collecting weapons from the Libyan civil war and shipping them to the Syrian rebels to use in overthrowing Assad.”

“Interesting story, but such stories are incredibly commonplace in that region. Why would you waste my time telling me about this story?”

“Because we have hacked Secretary Clinton’s e-mail, and one of her top aides forwarded her the story.”

“Really? They are paying attention to this story?”

“Yes, and she responded by asking that aide to see if they could find out the sources for the article.”

“Very interesting.”

“Further, Premier, her private henchman, Sidney Blumenthal, also forwarded her the article and asked if there was anything he or his contacts could do to help.”

“And no other stories about Benghazi have been brought to her attention?”

“Not to this degree, no. And none have prompted that level of response.”

“Look into this story. Find out all we can about it.”

And that is one way that unclassified, publicly-available information could become highly sensitive material. Not the story itself, but how it is being responded to at the highest levels.

@Jenos Idanian:
Even in your ‘whimsical’ scenario, we aren’t damaged by Clinton receiving said article. Of course the Sec of State would be interested in allegations about US operations abroad and would be interested in the sources of said information.
To add to your whimsy, if some other party attempted to make hay of Clinton having discussed said article on a private email because the information is super sensitive despite it being widely discussed in the news, that would certainly help convince foreign powers of the veracity of said articles. So, even in your whimsical scenario, the leakers here would have done more damage; assuming any damage was done at all.
I get it, you don’t like Clinton and you love to poke at people you disagree with politically, but there isn’t any convincing evidence that Clinton has done anything illegal. At worst she made a poor decision that was against some protocol, but even that isn’t certain, no matter mow much you wish it were.

The problem is that Hillary’s e-mails were NOT protected by the federal government. She deliberately chose to forfeit both the technical and legal power of the government to protect her e-mails so she could try to keep them out of the reach of her domestic political rivals.

The people who were interested in what the Secretary of State was discussing with her most trusted aides didn’t have to worry about defeating the US government’s best encryption methods or being charged with espionage or getting counter-hacked by the CIA or the NSA or any other resources we might bring into cyberwarfare because Hillary was more worried about the Republicans in Congress looking over her shoulder — which they had every legal right to do so.

For the sake of argument, let’s say that she broke no laws with her private e-mail server. By choosing to leave her communications with her top aides so vulnerable to foreign agents, she demonstrated a disqualifying level of poor jodgment. In not recognizing the potential danger those communications could pose if revealed to other nations, she showed a disqualifying level stupidity, inexperience, or both.

And finally, in going for this legalistic defense of her actions, she shows that she puts her own political security above the naiton’s security, and that she considers her political opposition far more dangerous than other countries.

The question I have is, how the hell does that no disqualify her in your eyes?

@anjin-san:Yeah, expecting anything remotely substantive from you is about that futile. It took me a while to catch on to that, but now I keep that foremost in mind when you show up and try to derail the discussions.

The problem is that Hillary’s e-mails were NOT protected by the federal government. She deliberately chose to forfeit both the technical and legal power of the government to protect her e-mails so she could try to keep them out of the reach of her domestic political rivals.

The people who were interested in what the Secretary of State was discussing with her most trusted aides didn’t have to worry about defeating the US government’s best encryption methods or being charged with espionage or getting counter-hacked by the CIA or the NSA or any other resources we might bring into cyberwarfare

What part of “email is not secure” are you incapable of understanding? Everything you posted here is sheer nonsense, and it now appears you are actively working to remain uninformed.

Hillary Clinton was the first Secretary of State to routinely use email, and has turned over thousands of messages to be archived. I view that as a positive development, and more important than who the email host was. All in all, the entirety of these facts is a positive mark in her column, when considering whether or not to vote for her.

You know, that ties in well with this remark about you from another commenter…

it now appears you are actively working to remain uninformed.

& the fact that you remain willfully ignorant tells much about your character. Perhaps there are positives about you that remain unseen in this forum. What you see of another person on a blog is often a tiny fraction of the whole. The fact that you think you can learn “all you need to know” in here is telling, or perhaps your need to know is just exceptionally limited. Listening to you, that certainly seems to be the case. Part of your overcompensation is that you fancy yourself a perceptive fellow, when it is clear to me you are not.

As for me, when I encounter someone of substance, I might try to have a substantive discussion with them. Which explains why I never have one with you.

@David M: What part of “email is not secure” are you incapable of understanding?

We have finally reached my personal “no shit, Sherlock” point.

No shit e-mail can never be absolutely secure. You’re using the “perfect is the enemy of good” argument. Since no e-mail can never be absolutely secure, why bother trying to protect it?

The real-world argument says that since we know that e-mail can never be absolutely secure, Hillary had two obligations she should have followed: 1) use the best security available to her to discourage most would-be snoops, and 2) keep truly sensitive material out of her e-mail anyway. She did neither. Instead, her security measures were aimed at keeping them out of the hands of those who were legally authorized and required to review her conduct.

By your arguing, why should we lock our doors? There isn’t a door lock that is 100% secure. Nor should we bother with vaccines, as they aren’t 100% effective. You’re not that stupid, are you?

@anjin-san: all those words, so little worth even saying, let alone noticing.

Your sole value to me is not your approval, but entertainment — have you found some new way to try to distract attention away from the topic at hand, or are you still trying the same tired bullshit? Rather, what new spin are you putting on your same tired bullshit?

The real-world argument says that since we know that e-mail can never be absolutely secure, Hillary had two obligations she should have followed: 1) use the best security available to her to discourage most would-be snoops, and 2) keep truly sensitive material out of her e-mail anyway. She did neither. Instead, her security measures were aimed at keeping them out of the hands of those who were legally authorized and required to review her conduct.

“More secure” is simply a false sense of security. You haven’t presented any evidence that there was any material was classified *at that time* and was sent by Hillary Clinton. If you are using classified years later as the standard, then you’re actually making argument that email shouldn’t be used at all, and that isn’t specific to Hillary Clinton. Your final point makes no sense, given that we are discussing the emails, they weren’t kept from anyone.

By your arguing, why should we lock our doors? There isn’t a door lock that is 100% secure. Nor should we bother with vaccines, as they aren’t 100% effective.

No, I’m saying there’s nothing equivalent to a lock or exterior door in the email scenario. There are different variations of screen doors that don’t latch, but there’s no reason to pretend one is significantly more secure than another.

@Jenos Idanian: It’s nice that you can correctly type the word “stupid” so many times in a row. Clearly many of us have underestimated your talents.

That aside, it was you who claimed that a newspaper article would not constitute a security breach but the fact that someone mentioned it would.

I do, however, enjoy your notion that Russian intelligence is made up of people so stupid they are incapable of understanding the importance of an item they read in the newspaper until they hack into the Secretary of State’s email and discover that an unofficial adviser forwarded it to her as well.

I wonder how much of the Russian intelligence agencies have been searching for that Kenyan prince who offered Clinton thirty million dollars if she’d just send her banking details.

@Jenos Idanian:
The failure was in your example, not in other people’s failure to read it. You still haven’t explained how Clinton having the WaPo article in question sent to her and held on her server actually caused any material damage or let anyone anywhere know anything they didn’t already know. Your “whimsical” hypotheticals didn’t elucidate that basic problem with your argument.

Guys, I don’t think you understand the national security implications of Hillary’s incompetence. We are lucky that there are far seeing patriots like Jenos on the job working to keep America safe. Let me break down the scenario for you:

So, Yuri, what do you have for me today?”

“Premier Putin, we have accessed Hillary Clinton’s mail server.”

“That is excellent news! We will soon humble the Americans thanks to that woman’s foolishness. What have we learned?”

“Premier, we now know what newspaper articles she reads!”

“Astonishing! It’s as if we can read her mind. This will be a gold mine of intelligence information. What articles does she read?”

“Premier, she reads… she reads most of them… again with a great appreciation for the press, for the media…”

“But which ones specifically? I’m curious.”

“Um, all of ’em, any of ’em that, um, have, have been in front of her over all these years. Um…”

“Yuri, please! Can you name a few? It’s a simple question!”

“She has a vast variety of sources where she gets her news…”

Yes folks, thanks to Hillary, we are totally screwed. The woman belongs in prison.

@Grewgills: The question was, how can publicly-available information compromise national security. And the answer is in how it is received and discussed at the highest levels.

Suppose the Washington Post publishes ten stories about secret CIA operations going on around the world. At CIA headquarters, one of those articles is copied and forwarded to the top people, and also shared with the top people at State and the White House. The other nine are ignored.

If you worked for one of those governments being targeted by those operations, wouldn’t it be useful to know which of those ten articles is garnering all that official attention?

Technically, the article being passed around is not classified, and there’s no law being broken in passing it along. But if the wrong people find out just which articles are getting that much attention, and which aren’t, you can get a hell of a good idea on what stories are causing the most worry in Washington — and, consequently, which stories might be worthy of further scrutiny.

It’s a variant of the old saying “when you’re getting the most flak, you know you’re over the target.” Or “where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”

@Jenos Idanian:
The article in question was about the US drone program. She, or any SoS, would be interested in it and would be interested in its sources regardless of its veracity. There isn’t anyone with an intelligence agency competent enough to break into her email that wouldn’t already know that she would be interested. We lose absolutely nothing by them learning she is interested. This is why you cannot show how we were harmed. We weren’t. She didn’t further communicate verification of any “secret” information contained in the article, so no new information would have been given to any hacker. There is no mechanism to damage US interests from the sending of the WaPo article to her or it being held on her server.
Now, if we suppose that the information from that WaPo article weren’t already widely known by every security operation in the world* there still wouldn’t be any damage from her receiving and holding the info absent her communicating that the information was true. Now, where potential damage could come in is if there is something that verifies the information in the hypothetical article. One source could be Clinton stating that the information was true. She didn’t. Another could be sources in our Congress screaming for her head for holding highly classified information that gives away US sources and operational details in reference to said article. Now those congressional leakers have verified the sources and operational details contained in said article. See how these whimsical speculations work out?

All of the above also assumes that she gave this particular article much more attention than she gave the hundreds of other articles forwarded to her when she was SoS and that a hacker would be able to pick this needle out of that haystack.

You are basing your whole line of attack on unsubstantiated conjecture rather than sober judgement of the facts in evidence. Given your pattern of behavior, all evidence points to your outrage being selective and based on partisanship.

* That the US government has a drone program that targets suspected terrorists around the world is known to every security operation in the world and is also widely known even outside those spheres. You and I knew about it well before anything about Clinton’s emails was ever being discussed.